What Is Language?
Specifically, Arbitrariness?
- Uses symbols not related to the concept that they represent
What Is Language?
Specifically, Productivity?
- Produce communications that are unique; express novel ideas
What Is Language?
Specifically, Semanticity?
- Language represents a form of patterned information
What Is Language?
Specifically, Displacement?
- Language is independent of time, past, present, and future
What Is Language?
Specifically, Duality?
- Language is represented on two levels: sounds, underlying meaning
What is the different stages of Language Development?
- Crying (0-4m)
- Cooing/babbling (4-12)
- Initial words (12-18)
- Two-word sentences (18-36)
- Short sentences (2.5-5y)
- Adult usage (5y+)
What is Phonological Development?
- Refers to learning the sounds of a language
- Babbling includes subset of language sounds that serves a social function
What is Atypical Language Development?
- Can be impaired if there are significant delays in early learning of language
- Makes early intervention a priority (e.g., cochlear implants)
What is Morphological Development?
- Free morphemes stand alone, bound morphemes attach to free morph.
- Children learn rules for attaching free morphemes to bounds morphemes (adding “ed” to “talk”)
- Mean Length of Utterance is the number of morphemes per sentence
- This increases with age/lang. Mean Length of Utterance refers to number of morphemes per sentence – this increases with age/lang. devel.
What is Syntactic Development?
- Syntax are rules of grammar
- How words are arranged into sentences
- Relating events within a sentence through the use of conjunctions
- Doesn’t usually appear until around 3 years
What is Semantic Development?
- Refers to a word’s meaning
- There is a major spurt in word acquisition that begins at around 18 months of age
- Typically begins after around 50 or so words are known
What is the Holophrastic Period?
- Whole object assumption: new word applies to whole object
- Taxonomic assumption: words can be generalized to a group of things
- Mutual exclusivity: assumption – different words refer to different things
- Children use these rules/constraints along with social cues to learn semantics
over/under-extension
What does Pragmatics Development refer to?
- Refers to how language is actually used, particularly in social situation
Name three Theories of Language Development?
- Learning Theory (students absorb, process and retain info)
- Chomsky/nativist (preprogrammed)
- Social-interactionist (Lev Vygotsky)
Examples of Learning theory?
- Operant conditioning (Skinner)
- Imitation (Bandura)
- Adults shape child’s speech through reinforcement
What is the Nativist/Chomsky Theory in greater detail?
- Environmental input was necessary. They rejected language development and solely driven by the environment
- Proposed that structure of language was what we hear when people talk
- The Deep structure is universal to all languages (spoken or not)
- In humans, the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) processes incoming stimuli and detects underlying patterns
What is the Critical Period?
- Language-deprivation in childhood produces non-optimal language development despite intensive learning efforts (e.g., Genie or Victor)
- Differences in grammatical competence based on age of language acquisition
- Children show better language plasticity after l.h. damage
Why Is There A Critical Period?
- Newport’s “Less Is More” theory
- Young kids have cognitive immaturity, which limits the amount of linguistic information they can process at a time
- This automatically breaks down and simplifies language, making it easier to learn
What does it mean to be a Social Interactionist?
- Bruner notes that learning language is emphasized by differences and meanings
- Learn through posture and gestures
- Children do not learn extra languages through passive learning (e.g., TV)
What are the Gender Differences when it comes to linguistic advantage?
- There is mixed evidence of women having a linguistic advantage
- A learned/cultural difference in that girls are given more “intense” exposure to language
- Some very early differences in language acquisition suggest that women may have innate differences
